The North Recommends: The Braag
The Braag is an indie publisher in Newcastle, publishing beautiful and strange poetry chapbooks and speculative fiction. Founder Kym Deyn tells us more about The Braag’s ‘anti-burnout’ approach to publishing, and their latest publication Fernseed.
The Braag is a shape-changing trickster spirit that appears in the legends of County Durham, appearing variously as a calf, a horse, a headless naked man, and four people standing under a sheet. It’s also a small independent publisher based out of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. It was established in 2020 in a moment of dazzling common sense, and has gone on to run poetry murder mystery nights, the micro-journal Carmen et Error, publish poetry pamphlets and speculative fiction.
At The Braag, we want to do beautiful, strange things on a small scale. We’re interested in making projects that are sustainable for those involved with them—for our writers, designers and editors. We like to think we’re “anti-burnout”. We publish two poetry pamphlets and one prose book a year, plus a handful of zines. We use a mix of human artists and archival illustrations to make our books tiny works of art, and our limited-run zines are made by the team from handmade and linen paper stock. Our aim isn’t necessarily to grow, but to keep true to our founding ethos—this press is our patch: sustainable, bizarre and Northern.
We’ve published books about worlds of sentient woodlice, the language of a pond, and the tale of three magic thimbles passed down through a Ukrainian family. Our taste is eclectic, with a love of nature, folklore and imagination. We love working with new writers too. Our most recent title is Fernseed: A Collection of Tales by Sarah Royston, a novella-length collection of short stories that mixes history, myth, queerness and ecology into a lush selection of worlds that are guaranteed to sweep you away. Here are ancient standing stones, crackling pylons, deep holy wells and Victorian industrial run-off, described by Natalia Theodoridou, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Sour Cherry as “Part poetry, part short story collection, part spell–Fernseed is utterly enchanting. A queer, earthy, larger-on-the-inside book that will sing to me for a long time. Uniquely imagined and deliciously irreverent.” Fernseed is illustrated throughout and is printed on 100% recycled paper. We hope you’ll check out our books and let them into your brain, where they’ll flourish like a beautiful but invasive species of lichen.
Find out more about The Braag
Website: https://thebraag.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebraag/
X: https://x.com/TheBraag
